The Monk's Record Player
Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Published: 2019
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Publisher's Description
The story of a monk, a minstrel, and the music that brought them together In 1965 writer-activist-monk Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place—the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during the summer of 1966. In this striking parallel biography of two countercultural icons, Robert Hudson plumbs the depths of Dylan’s surprising influence on Merton’s life and writing, recounts each man’s interactions with the woman who linked them together—Joan Baez—and shows how each transcended his immediate troubles and went on to new heights of spiritual and artistic genius. Readers will discover here a riveting story of creativity and crisis, burnout and redemption, in the tumultuous era of 1960s America.
Endorsements (5)
Foreword
“You may think, as I at first did, that pairing a Utopian hermit monk and a demon-haunted rock star is just plain perverse or at the very least willfully paradoxical. But there you’d be dead wrong. . . . In the end it’s Bob Hudson’s love for Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan that’s the alchemical fire that makes [this book] work. As curious as this cockamamie pairing is, The Monk’s Record Player is a meditation on inspiration, contact highs, and the unknowable workings of the cosmos.”
“Robert Hudson’s revealing ‘parallel biography’ shows how two of the most prolific and influential figures in the 1960s, both perpetually restless spiritual pilgrims, shared a passion for prophetic poetry, an opposition to the war in Vietnam, and a boundless inquisitiveness. In this enjoyable and insightful book Hudson connects dots that other Merton scholars have overlooked.”
“A warm and vivid picture of two very different but unexpectedly related countercultural icons in that extraordinary mid-sixties moment of hope and imaginative enlargement. This book enables us to see some of the deep currents of that era and to reacquaint ourselves with two great, unclassifiable figures.”
“Artfully demonstrates how the minds of two individual cultural icons merge with a message that all the world needs to hear. Difficult to put down once you open the first page and begin to read.”
“A gloriously detailed account of two solitary yet world-famous artists in a decade that still bears surprising fruit. Hudson’s book takes you on an unexpected journey with Merton and Dylan—an enlightening, challenging, and refreshing hiatus from the demands of our digital age.”
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